BYOD – The case for MDM

More and more enterprises are embracing the ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD) model. This model essentially allows employees to use a device of their choice, procured by the employees themselves, for work related tasks. These devices are used both inside the office and outside. There are some obvious benefits to this model. Improved employee productivity, lower hardware costs to the company, and employee satisfaction are a few such benefits. However, along with the benefits, there are certain risks involved too.

 

BYOD can be very advantageous if it is utilized and monitored properly. Though what seems to be savings on the surface can cost you dearly if you don’t have appropriate policies and platforms in place. New Technologies bring newer ways to access and manipulate data, advanced devices, and alternatives to the traditional platforms. These technologies in turn need to be understood well and managed properly, or issues can crop up where you never expected them to.

 

The first thing that IT should do in order to curtail the mobile risks is put in place policies and guidelines that prevent a ‘free for all’ scenario. Employees must clearly understand that the newfound freedom in the choice of tech comes with responsibilities that cannot be neglected. Most organizations today have some form of policy and guideline documentation. However, soon after implementing and even enforcing these policies, they realize that the results are not what they thought they would achieve. Policies just aren’t enough for protective corporate data in the face of increasing mobile proliferation and diversity. But why? We often miss the nature of the subject of the policies – the device. It is out there somewhere, being accessed and used by people unknown in addition to the employee, and used for tasks unknown, and carrying apps unknown. With so many variables, there are just too many things that could go wrong.

 

The solution to this dilemma is a good mobile device management (MDM) solution. These solutions provide peace of mind to IT about the security of the data and the devices. Key features offered by these solutions are:

 

1. Device Management – MDM makes the complex task of such as device configuration and updating cross platform devices simple. At a minimum, an MDM system must therefore provide certain features. Remote configuration for security, and application configuration settings, and imposing policies leveraging company active directory service is one such functionality.  Remote operating system and application updating (Ensuring that employees have consistent versions of OS and application software), Remote inventorying (for asset management nd device landscape management), and     Remote control (for issue identification and resolution) are others.

 

2. Application Management – Provision of control over mobile applications is rapidly gaining popularity, and vendors are addressing this through their solutions. In part this stems from the rising number of malicious applications that are appearing on the Android platform, as well as a recognition that many organizations are rolling out their own mobile applications for employees to use. Some key application management related functions included in the management solutions include - Applications whitelists and blacklists (allowing access to certain corporate applications by policy or preventing users from downloading malicious or undesirable applications), Enterprise app stores, App security("application wrapping," or the ability to put policies into the library of an application so that, for example, users can't cut and paste from the app or move documents out of it), and remote Data wipe by application or by container.

 

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